ABSTRACT
In 1977 while finishing breakfast in the Las Vegas hotel where I was attending a research conference, I was suddenly assailed by an idea that I hurriedly transcribed on a close-at-hand piece of paper – the back of a Keno card. The recent recipient of a PhD in experimental social psychology, and newly appointed director of something called a Centre of Leisure Studies, I had been struggling to give form to an idea on which to base a research program on the psychology of leisure. The idea eventually led to the development of an experimental paradigm that provided a framework for a number of experiments that I and a succession of my graduate students completed over the next twenty years – experiments in which we examined the subjective nature of leisure (e.g., Bradley and Mannell, 1984; Mannell, 1979; Mannell and Bradley, 1986; Iwasaki and Mannell, 1999). Although I went on to study leisure experiences outside of the laboratory with colleagues using other methods such as the field experiment (e.g., Backman and Mannell, 1986) and signal-contingent sampling (e.g., Mannell, Zuzanek and Larson, 1988; Zuzanek and Mannell, 1993), these early ‘experiments in leisure’ provided me with some of my most interesting challenges and convinced me that the subjective nature of leisure is amenable to empirical scrutiny by psychological science.
